The art and business of film with Bob Strauss

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Guess it was too much to expect “Monsters University,” the prequel to Pixar’s “Monsters, Inc.,” to be at least a little scary or, failing that, a cartoon version of “Animal House.” No such luck, of course; this is a G-rated corporate product through and through.
Wish it could have at least been more clever. “Monsters, Inc.” wasn’t one of the best early Pixars, but it had some brilliant stuff like the whole doors concept and, y’know, “Kitty.” This one feels flat in both the visual invention and gag departments, even in 3-D!
I know that wasn’t funny, but I barely chuckled through most of the movie, so there.
Anyway, the prequel is content to pit Billy Crystal’s Mike and John Goodman’s Sulley against mean frat brothers and an imperious dean (nicely voiced by Helen Mirren) and try to convince us it wasn’t easy for them to become the lifelong friends we know they’ll turn into. It’s colorful and we’re introduced to lots of new freaks, but none of them look like they’ll be memorable.
However, going against the tide of just about every other one of this summer’s big studio behemoths, “Monsters U” gets a whole lot better in its last 20 minutes. Kids who grew up on “Inc.” will probably dig this one’s college hijinx, even though they’re probably getting into far more interesting trouble now. And I’ll also give “MU” this: If you’ve just got to go to a big new Hollywood non-event this weekend, “MU” is a better bet than “World War Z.”
Couldn’t there have been one binge-drunk ogre, though?

There has been some controversy in the critical community over “Fruitvale Station,” Ryan Coogler’s fly-on-the-wall recreation of Oscar Grant’s last day on Earth. Some feel it idealizes the young man who was killed by a transit cop in Oakland on his way home from a New Years Eve celebration across the bay, and therefore falsely earns what has so far been rapturous film festival audience responses.
I was looking for hints of hagiography while I watched the film and was pleasantly disappointed to find few. Sure, Oscar is shown as a loving father, decent boyfriend to his little girl’s mother and wanting to please his own mom. But the terrific actor Michael B. Jordan also makes it abundantly clear that the guy had a dangerous temper and was an inveterate screw-up. That he chose this particular day to resolve to try better may or may not have been true, but while some may find that manipulative, I thought it added another intriguing facet to a wonderfully complex portrayal.
If Coogler’s script did somehow stack the deck, the first-time feature director sure made it all look spontaneous when the cameras rolled. Not just Jordan, but everyone from the likes of Octavia Spencer and Melonie Diaz to the crowd of BART passenger bit players hit it convincingly, consistently. Rachel Morrison’s cinematography is as alive as the characters, which also helps the movie achieve something rare: the sense that you’re walking beside someone through their life – which is why so many come out of it wishing they could have done something to save him.

In the indie take on the end of civilization “Goodbye World,” cyber-millionaires and hippies face the apocalypse. Comedy, romantic conflict and some intimations of lawlessness and grassroots repression all jockey for attention in Denis Hennelly’s film, and while effective moments of each play out, for the most part these conflicting elements prevent the film from achieving a consistent tone and narrative focus. Of all the final days movies we’re being hit with this summer, this one seems the least urgent – and that includes “This Is the End.”
A bunch of old college friends hunker down in their software mogul buddy’s Northern California cabin when a toxic e-mail brings down the nation’s infrastructure. They play games, hook up, betray one another, resurrect old resentments and – like everyone in every other indie at the moment – get high. Bikers and power-drunk National Guardsmen provide outside menace.
There’s intelligence in Hennelly and Sarah Adina Smith’s script, and the cast (which includes Adrian Grenier, Ben McKenzie and Gaby Hoffmann) is mostly right on. How the group should behave during the crisis and what kind of world they want in its wake are discussed, but it rarely really feels like something all that life-affecting is happening. Maybe next time – and considering how big on wrecking the world filmmakers are at the moment, we can rest assured that there will be a next time.

Beautiful and atmospheric to the point of oxygen deprivation, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” may have something to say about an outlaw couple’s unbreakable love, but the movie is mainly engaged in flirting with pretension.
Set somewhere out in those miles and miles of Texas during what appears to be the early 1970s, David Lowery’s undeniably well-made film gives us a young country couple, Casey Affleck’s Bob Muldoon and Rooney Mara’s Ruth Guthrie, who love the dickens out of each other and, oh yeah, rob banks or some such (Lowery, who also wrote the script, ain’t real big on story specifics). In a shootout with deputies at their tumbledown shack, Ruth wounds an officer and Bob takes the fall for her. Four years later, he’s still in prison and she’s raising the adorable, tow-headed daughter he’s never seen. So Bob busts out and tension, of a sort, happens.
Slow-moving and bathed in honeyed underlighting, “Saints” has a dusty, museum-piece quality that’s no doubt meant to evoke similar and more vital country crime romances from the era it takes place in, such as Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us” and Terrence Malick’s “Badlands.” “Thieves’” star Keith Carradine even has a role in this one; you could call it a nudge nudge for cineastes, but he’s damn good even if his character’s, like most everyone else’s, relationship to the central couple is never quite satisfactorily explained. That’s not a complaint, by the way. Mystery is one of the few things that keeps “Saints” going, energy and emotional revelation being such rare factors in the piece.

It’s terribly difficult to make basic goodness cinematic, but director Destin Daniel Cretton keeps it pretty riveting for a long stretch of “Short Term 12.” Informed by Cretton’s (who also wrote the script) own experience working with foster kids, this lovely, quite natural-feeling feature makes virtues out of patience, easygoing professionalism and true caring.
What’s that you say? Those things are virtues anyway? Not in movies they’re not. They pretty much act as antibiotics to conflict and drama, and can easily lead to maudlin sentimentality.
But “ST12’s” note perfect ensemble cast demands our attention, mainly by keeping it real.
Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr. stand out as a young couple who directly oversee the teens at the title facility. He’s just as wonderful as can be (and you never want to smack him for it) and she’s got a few, hidden issues that will lead to some third act drama, but they rarely impede her empathy for her troubled charges.
Shot in Santa Clarita and thereabouts with a handheld intimacy that lends just the right degree of jittery discomfort, “ST12” also revels in storytelling. There’s a hilariously scatological tale told at the beginning, a sweetly uplifting one at the end, and in the middle a parable about a lonely octopus that may be the most heartbreaking thing you’ll hear all year.
This movie might be one of 2013’s best as well.

Nahid Persson Sarvestani was one of the lucky ones. She escaped the clutches of Iran’s theocracy shortly after the revolution and settled into a comfortable life in Sweden.
Except, quite naturally, the onetime left-wing activist felt immense survivor’s guilt for her comrades who were imprisoned by their former allies in bringing down the Shah’s regime, not to mention for her younger brother who was executed by Islamofascists. So she gathered together a half-dozen of her sisters in the struggle who eventually got out too, and taped them all for a wintry week at her Scandinavian modern home.
Beside the now middle-aged women’s utterly infuriating accounts of their prison abuse, what emerges most remarkably from “My Stolen Revolution” is how consistently they all can still smile, even laugh, and clearly enjoy life now. Sad as it is in so many ways, this essential documentary is a stirring monument to the joy of freedom, and not to be missed when it screens again at LAFF on Wednesday at 7:10 p.m.

Actress Lake Bell’s smart and funny feature-directing debut “In a World…” juggles sex farce, feminist critique, family conflict and showbiz satire pretty deftly.
Bell, who also wrote (and won an award at Sundance for that), plays a third generation Hollywood vocal talent whose pompous, voice-over recording pro dad (Fred Melamed) has belittled her goal of becoming the first female movie trailer spokesperson her whole adult life. With lots of neurotic insight but a ton of easygoing charm as well, Bell steers the film through the dreams and disappointments of a dozen eccentric characters, most all of whom, despite their comic exaggeration at times, come off as quite authentic by the end. The shadow world of voice acting seems to be accurately caught, too, and while the film immerses us in its borderline goofy details, Bell never lets them overwhelm the film’s human element – or its sharp cultural/political statement, which Geena Davis clarifies in a gobsmacking climactic cameo.

“I’m So Excited!,” which opened the Los Angeles Film Festival Thursday, is the JetBlue of Pedro Almodovar movies. Frills such as psychological depth and narrative ingenuity never made it on board the Spanish director’s cumulus cloud of a comedy; the thing just insists on floating as high up in the air as the damaged plane that’s its main setting.
When a landing gear problem forces a Mexico-bound flight to circle aimlessly over the Iberian Peninsula, the crew dutifully prevents panic by drugging the entire coach cabin with muscle relaxants. That leaves First Class to keep calm, which three gay flight attendants attempt to do by serving mescaline-laced Valencia cocktails and performing a lip-synched production number to the film’s title song. A variety of erotic encounters – none of them up to Almodovar’s usual inventive standards – ensue, while the pilots prove more interested in exploring their sexuality than in safely landing the aircraft.
Almodovar has often balanced superficial giddiness with jet-black melodrama, but with this one he seems to have challenged himself to keep things all surface giggles, all the time. It’s not the skin he lives in – Pedro thrives on complex damage – and definitely not “The Skin I Live In,” his last, disturbing masterpiece. But for a light and naughty festival opener, “I’m So Excited!” got the job done. The audience saw something kind of sophisticated, but didn’t experience any real turbulence.
Or excitement.

AFTER LUCIA Following his wife’s sudden death, a chef moves with his adolescent daughter from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City. While he vents his grief in gusts of depressive, sometimes violent behavior, she apparently just rolls with it and finds acceptance from an upscale crowd at her new school – until her friends turn on her. Michel Franco’s Cannes Film Festival prize-winner is merciless, both in its depiction of bullying and step-by-step insistence that character governs fate. Superbly acted and composed, this unforgiving examination of the demons in our nature is anything but pleasant. It’s also impossible to turn one’s eyes from.

AMOUR 2012 is finishing out as a year of outstanding film acting. In this entry alone, I praise Daniel Day-Lewis, Suraj Sharma, Marion Cotillard, Denis Lavant, Hopkins and Mirren, Cooper-Lawrence-De Niro and assorted Germans, Mexicans and Romanians. Earlier in the year “Deep Blue Sea,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Take This Waltz” and “The Master” each delivered multiple awesome performances. Denzel Washington has never been better than he is in “Flight” and Matthew McConaughey was great in some half-dozen different titles. But I doubt any other 2012 release will showcase as much sheer acting mastery as Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant bring to “Amour.” A simple story presented with neither formal nor behavioral fuss, this French-language film by Austrian director Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon”) follows an old married couple as the wife deteriorates after a pair of strokes. Both icons of European cinema, Riva and Trintingnant display a magnificent dutifulness to their roles: she explores every facet of frustration, pain and dementia a dying woman can go through, while he applies his famous beady-eyed gaze and unusually resonant monotone to the twilight existence of an overwhelmed caregiver. “Amour” is about wasting away, and some people think that’s a downer; acting this good, we shouldn’t need to point out, is an affirmation of life.

BARBARA This admirably poker-faced but rather predictable Cold War drama is the type of German Oscar entry that makes you long for the deranged inventiveness of the Herzog/Fassbinder (and yes, still divided) days. A doctor exiled from East Berlin to a Baltic Coast town spends most of her downtime, unsurprisingly, planning to sneak over to the West. Sentimental complications, unfortunately, have their way with her and the narrative, despite actress Nina Hoss’ best efforts to behave like she’s in something far more severe and sneaky than what Christian Petzold’s written and directed.

BEYOND THE HILLS Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” is rightly considered one of the greatest movies of the last decade. This follow-up doesn’t have the concentrated power and tension of that abortion drama, but it does expand the director’s searing insight into how women are oppressed, both internally and externally, by the institutions of men. A rustic Moldavian monastery is upended when one of the Orthodox nun’s young friend pays a visit. She wants to rekindle the romantic relationship the two had in an orphanage; the ex and all of the other religious people want the newcomer to join their celibate order. Bad craziness ensues on both sides. Mungiu makes it clear, however, that a resurgent medieval mindset, now free to be expressed and indulged, is no less toxic than the intrusive Communism that ruled the Romania of his previous film. The lead performers, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan, split the best actress prize at Cannes, and their emotionally demanding work certainly earned it. But everyone plays it perfectly in “Beyond the Hills,” which makes for tragedy on a grand and absolute scale.

CAESAR MUST DIE Italy’s great brother team Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (“Night of the Shooting Stars,” “Good Morning, Babylon”) stage rehearsals and a performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” inside a real Roman prison. As the inmates run lines and break character, new resonance is given to the play’s themes of crime, loyalty and betrayal. Methinks the rehearsals were as staged as the actual performance, but no matter; the real convicts, murderers among them, invest all they’ve got into their acts, and make something unique and powerful to watch.

HITCHCOCK Some have complained about the cheap, speculative psychology and mirroring soap operas in this biopic about the suspense master’s struggle to make what would become his greatest, most influential hit, “Psycho.” Yeah, OK, the critics are right. They’re also immune to the wicked fun director Sacha Gervasi wrings out of old Alfred’s hots for young actresses and his long-tolerating wife Alma’s finally fed-up responses. As the great collaborators – on films if not as deftly in marriage – Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren tackle truly dysfunctional behavior with wry wit and devastating British reserve. Scarlett Johansson (as Janet Leigh), Jessica Biel (Vera Miles) and Michael Stuhlbarg (Lew Wasserman) are topnotch, too, and James D’Arcy is such a perfect incarnation of Tony Perkins that you wish he’d been given more to do. Personally, I could have done without the Ed Gein stuff, but hey, it’s a frightful funhouse take on the mother of modern horror movies and you can’t expect every trick to work. The surprise is that so much of it does, even if you acknowledge how lame a few fundamentals are.

HOLY MOTORS Leos Carax’s first feature in 13 years seems like one of his typically loony exercises on the surface. A strange kind of actor, played by Carax regular Denis Lavant, is chauffeured around Paris in a white stretch limo to even stranger assignments: simulating violence and sex in a motion-capture suit; disrupting a cemetery fashion shoot disguised as a flower-eating troll and kidnapping its willing model, played by Eva Mendes; performing a heartbreaking musical setpiece with, of all people, Kylie Minogue in an abandoned department store; et cetera. What ultimately emerges though, between declarations about the changing nature of cinema and the addictive joy of acting, is a sad and shattering statement on mortality and, perhaps, its aftermath. Lavant is as antic and surreal as his countrymen Riva and Trintignant are restrained and natural in “Amour,” but he gets to the emotional viscera of the matter just as effectively. His work is very effective indeed; also a marvel of versatility and stamina.

LIFE OF PI Ang Lee turns the crazy bestseller into a luscious, CG 3-D feast. Water, wild animals and a vast cosmic emptiness all come to marvelous digital life while a tale of primal, impossible survival is told. As the teenager who lives to tell about his shipwreck adventure with a Bengal tiger, newcomer Suraj Sharma is as awesome as the computer wizardry in his physical dexterity and ropes-end emotionalism. And when he just quietly tells a different story, the depth Sharma plumbs is engrossing, then breath-halting. That part grounds this fantastic beyond fantastic movie in solid psychological realism. I sure hope this kid acts again.

LINCOLN Steven Spielberg’s best movie since “Minority Report” zeroes in on a single month during the Civil War – January, 1865 – when the 16th president moved to get a lame duck Congress to abolish slavery. Tony Kushner’s mind-bogglingly smart script details the lobbying, arm-twisting and sheer gamesmanship it took to convince a majority of racists to do the right thing. It also deploys comedy relief in truly expert fashion, while appreciating the great language of Lincoln and the era’s other master orators. The war’s brother-on-brother butchery remains in the background, but haunts every good and bad intention of all concerned, as must surely have been the case after four years of slaughter. And it’s not all politics and war; Abe’s confrontations with his wife Mary Todd, shown here not to be as crazy as history suggests, display a nicely humanizing, uncontrolled side of the Great Manipulator. Sally Field is something of a revelation in the handful of scenes she dominates as Mrs. Lincoln. But as you’ve probably heard, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Abraham is something for the ages: picture-perfect physically, often folksy but rippling with both eloquent zeal and the coercive egotism of a power playing genius. The British actor can also be great fun, and is quite cognizant that there were certain things that Lincoln just didn’t get (like, well, black people). We’ll close by noting that, among the movie’s many other sterling qualities, Janusz Kaminski’s oil-lamp lighting looks both gorgeous and right for the period.

THE MOST FUN I’VE EVER HAD WITH MY PANTS ON wasn’t. Two young women, childhood friends, drive around the Southwest spreading a dead father’s ashes and getting slightly Sapphic. The end. Well, no, there’s a dog and some other stuff. But really, performance artist/writer-director Drew Denny, who also plays one of the travelers, doesn’t get much going here, however outrageous and personal she may have imagined her story to be.

ON THE ROAD The best thing you can say about this adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation classic is that it got made. Episodic by nature, the film comes off like old news to anybody who grew up in the 1960s and later, much as “John Carter” must have seemed to the Star Wars and subsequent generations. Director Walter Salles deserves praise for approximating the bebop style of both Kerouac’s writing and the cultural ferment of the story’s postwar period. Performances range from adequate to one-note, but that’s not the actors’ faults. Really, how intrigued are we supposed to be at this point by watching young people indulging their urges and acting irresponsibly over and over again – even if this was really the first time that story was told in American?

ROOM 237 Rigorously playful may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it describes this intellectually tickling documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s movie “The Shining.” Five obsessive cinephiles prattle on about their interpretations of the film’s True Inner Meaning and/or Kubrick’s real intentions, while footage from the Stephen King adaptation is examined to prove their points – or, sometimes, not so much. I especially like the guy who believes that “The Shining,” which wasn’t exactly greeted with critical delight when it was released in 1980, was Kubrick’s cryptic admission that he’d faked the Apollo 11 Moon landing footage. But all of “237’s” theorists are amusingly obsessive and bracingly smart, which makes for a fun exercise in deep, and deeply kooky, film study.

A ROYAL AFFAIR It’s all elegantly European and demonstrably more sex-obsessed, but this Danish heritage production shares quite a few things with “Lincoln,” such as upfront social concerns, a fascination with how government operates at the highest levels and a determination to shed light on obscure but important pieces of history. Set in the 18th Century just as revolutionary fervor is taking hold farther south and across the Atlantic, Denmark’s Oscar entry presents a very weird triangular romance between the somewhat loony, libertine King, his English queen who can’t stand him and the progressive German doctor she takes as a lover and the monarch makes his most trusted adviser. Fine a palace intrigue as that makes, things really get complicated when this unlikely trio forms a united front to drag tradition- and religion-bound Denmark into the Enlightenment Era. A lot of this really happened, I think. If it didn’t, history should have been so lucky to have played out with the ribald and righteous brio this handsomely dressed-up, utterly bonkers production brings to the screen.

RUST AND BONE No doubt about it, the French are on fire this year. This one’s about an unlikely relationship between a semi-evolved bareknuckle boxer and a beautiful Sea World showgirl who suffers a calamitous accident. The interaction is primitive, the sex is raw and to-the-point, and their connection, limited as it seems, takes on the strength of tempered steel. The special effects, as accomplished in their way as “Life of Pi’s,” are seamless. Marion Cotillard opens up a galaxy of feelings and they’re all totally convincing. As the brute who appears to instinctively get what her character needs – and very little else about life, including what to do with his young son – Matthias Schoenaerts makes good on the promise he showed in last year’s “Bullhead.” Director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet,” “The Beat That My Heart Skipped”) has a way of framing handheld camerawork in a classic, beautiful manner; it meshes exquisitely with the love and filth his lenses capture.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK Director David O. Russell makes another oddball screwball to go alongside “Flirting with Disaster,” “I Heart Huckabees” and the sisters portions of “The Fighter.” Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro all masticate reams of complex dialogue throughout this story about certifiable Philly suburbans, all of whom are hung up on silly-cum-disturbing fixations. The acting is impressive and the love story, such as it is, plays out satisfyingly if not very revealingly. Masanobu Takayanagi’s floating camerawork makes it a real movie rather than a smarter-than-average sitcom, especially when everyone’s yammering at the same time in the same room.

THE ANGEL’S SHARE: I have limited tolerance for cute British caper comedies. But kitchen sink miserablist Ken Loach at least brings some convincing grime and grubbiness to the twee genre in this tale of Scottish louts who find a bit of direction in life when, while working court-ordered community service sentences, they’re taught to appreciate the finer points of single malt scotch. This, of course, leads to a unique, larcenous scheme, and while their plan is hardly plausible it does play out like something such as this might happen, if it ever could. The film’s whisky elements are impeccably presented – a big plus in my book – and there’s enough Glasgow grittiness to counteract the plot’s fundamental preciousness. Playing 11/5 at 7:30 and 11/7 at 4:30 p.m.

STARLET: New York filmmaker Sean Baker’s take on the San Fernando Valley gets the local light and languor just right. Its view of the porn business – not really addressed until halfway through the film, the better for us to get to know Dree Hemingway’s lead, well, starlet free of preconceived notions – seems fairly, workaday persuasive, too. The young woman’s relationship with a cranky, 85-year-old semi-shut-in she forcibly befriends provides the main narrative drive, and it’s at least unpredictable, if not quite as lucid as it ought to be. First-time actress Besedka Johnson is something to watch as the old lady, as is the girl’s pet chihuahua, portrayed by the director’s own talented dog. Plays 11/5 at 7 p.m. and 11/7 at 10 p.m.